Guggenheim Painting Proven to Be a Fake

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A painting in the Guggenheim collection initially attributed
to French modern artist Fernand Léger has languished out of view
for decades after it was suspected to be a fake.

Now scientists have confirmed that the artwork is a indeed
forgery; in a first, they detected faint signatures of Cold
War-era nuclear
bombs in the canvas that reveal the painting was created
after Léger's death.

The influential American art patron Peggy Guggenheim bought the
painting, believing it to be part of Léger's "Contraste de
Formes" (Contrasts of Forms), an abstract series created between
1913 and 1914 that breaks up figures into schematic units. (Léger
was a contemporary of Pablo Picasso.) In the 1970s, Léger
scholar Douglas Cooper voiced serious skepticism about its
authenticity. Without any consensus from experts, the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation, the current steward of the painting, has
never exhibited nor catalogued the artwork. [ Faux
Real: A Gallery of Forgeries ]

To solve this art historical enigma, scientists from the Italian
Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) took a tiny piece of the
canvas from an unpainted edge of the work. The team used a
particle accelerator to measure the concentration of carbon 14
(an isotope of carbon that has more neutrons than normal carbon
12) in the fabric, which would in turn allow them to determine
when the canvas was produced, or more specifically, when the
cotton was cut to make the canvas.

Carbon 14 is a radioactive variation of carbon,
and because plants pick up both types through photosynthesis, all
living organisms — cotton plants included — have the same ratio
of carbon 14 to stable carbon as the atmosphere. But a series of
nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s spiked this normally
consistent ratio.

"After 1955 the level of radiocarbon in the atmosphere, and thus
in living organisms, almost doubled in about 10 years," Pier
Andrea Mandò, head of the Florence division of the INFN,
explained in a statement.

"It is due to this rapid change that works from those years can
be dated extremely accurately," Mandò added. "In this case, it
has allowed us to discover that the canvas support could not have
been produced before 1959. The work cannot therefore be one of
Léger's original series of Contrastes de forms. Nor is it a later
copy by the artist, since Léger died in 1955."

Mandò said this is the first time a "bomb peak" comparison has
been used to reveal a contemporary art forgery. But other
scientists have used the telltale carbon 14 traces of these
nuclear tests to date
teeth and even determine the age of
elephant tusks and ivory.

"After about forty years of doubt surrounding the authenticity of
this painting, I am relieved that thanks to the application of
innovative scientific techniques, the cloud of uncertainty has at
last been lifted and Douglas Cooper's connoisseurship
vindicated," Philip Rylands, director of the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, said in a statement.

The new study on the Léger fake was detailed in The European
Physical Journal Plus.